Amarapura

For an hour or so I wandered around Amarapura. Such a mixture of sights and smells–the pungent aroma of frying fish and crabs, the cacophony of mostly-women’s voices enticing customers to the roadside cafes, the children laughing and running around the market, and hundreds and hundreds of monks in blood-red robes everywhere.

Monks begging for their daily meal outside the market near the U Bein’s Bridge. Photo by David Lansing.

Street food included fried crabs from Lake Taungthaman. Photo by David Lansing.

A young child with thanaka on his face walks around the market with his mother. Photo by David Lansing.

Little girls wait for their mother as she shops the market. Photo by David Lansing.

Clay pots outside the Mahagandhayon Monastery. Photo by David Lansing.

A line of monks for as far as the eye can see wait for their daily meal at the Mahagandhayon Monastery in Amarapura observed by almost as many tourists. Photo by David Lansing.

Just a few minutes walk from U Bein’s Bridge, the longest teak bridge in the world, is another remarkable site, Mahagandhayon, one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in Myanmar. Over a thousand monks live in the monastery so you see them everywhere in Amarapura but the big thing to do is to go to the monastery around 11am when hundreds of monks line up to receive their one daily meal.

It’s quite a sight. As is watching the almost equal number of tourists jostling each other to take photographs of the monks.

Monks cross over U Bein’s Bridge, the longest teak bridge in the world. Right, a vendor fries up shrimp cakes next to the bridge. Photos by David Lansing.

It seemed odd, but the first thing my guide, Sai, wanted to do in Mandalay was show me a bridge. “U Bein’s Bridge. Most famous bridge in the world,” said Sai.

Really? I’d never heard of it. “What makes it famous?” I asked him.

“Made of teak.”

As it turned out the bridge wasn’t in Mandalay proper but just south of the city in the town of Amarapura, one of the many former royal capitals. (The Burmese think nothing of changing their capital, usually for astrological reasons or the like. Over the centuries it’s been in Bagan, Pegu, Ava, Sagaing, Amarapura, and Yangon. The current capital is Naypyidaw.)

Anyway, the bridge was built around 1850 when the capital moved from Ava (an hour’s walk southwest) to Amarapura. The mayor of Amarapura, U Bein, salvaged the teak planks from the old palace building to construct the 1.2km bridge over Taungthaman Lake.

So if you’re at all like me and are told that the most famous bridge in the world—which you have never heard of—is a half-mile long teak bridge made from two-hundred year-old planks taken from a royal palace, you imagine that what you’re going to see is something very grand. But that’s not what U Bein’s Bridge is at all. It’s very simple. And low to the water. And rather rickety (many of the pillars look dangerously decayed and some of the planks were cracked or broken so you had to be very careful where you stepped).

Basically it’s a very pedestrian bridge with no architectural flourishes that serves the thousands of locals—farmers, shoppers, monks—wanting to get from one side of the lake to the other. I noticed that there were a number of police on the bridge and asked Sai if that was to prevent acts of vandalism. He said no, it was to prevent local youths from harassing tourists. “Some locals tired of so many tourists walking on bridge,” he said.

If we were a shrimp fisherman trying to get from one side of the lake to the other, all the camera-toting tourists would bother us too.

The best way to see Lake Taungthaman and U Bein’s Bridge, in the background, is to rent a gondola. Photo by David Lansing.